Sarajevo
Trip Start
Jan 06, 2006
1
70
120
Trip End
Sep 02, 2008
Sarajevo,
Bosnia and Herzegovina
Sunday, November 5, 2006
We met up with the ladies from NZ to walk around the city. Our first stop still stands only a hundred meters away from the hostel. It is a golden shell of a building in 19 century style and with Oriental decorations. We had some conflicting ideas about it. I said it was the Library. Everyone else said it was the city Hall. The Sarajevo Tourist Historic Guide solved the argument: it was both. Noel Malcom, in his book on Bosnia, mentions in his prologue that he wishes he had had access to the library archives. I didn't quite understand why he said that when I read it a while back. Here's what he meant: a Serb grenade torched 90% of the archives' content near the beginning of the 1992-5 siege.
Our next stop, wandering to the West of the city, was one of the seemingly infinite graveyards in Sarajevo. Some military types were standing around in their uniforms and the STHG book clarified everything: the first president of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Alija Izetbegovic, is buried there and an honour guard is constantly on watch for any ne'erdowell. I could take photos but they told me to stay off the grass! Then we climbed up a hill to see the old barracks and fortifications at Vratnik. Not quite so exciting: the fortifications these days are just a bit of ruined walls.
The hills Westwards had been turned white by last night's snowfall, and we could see again precisely why it took so long to get into the city: because of the mountains and the roads are so curvy, and what may have been in another city the highway out was just a two lane mountain road. I heard that there is no policital will to spend money to build decent highways. Facing East we had a great view of the snow covered city, many of its scars not quite concealed with by snow.
It was really obvious how many graveyards there are in the city. I should say that of course every city has its dead, but here so many were buried all at once; the small forests of clean white marble gravestellae are impossible to miss between the red roof tiles and the green hills. The snow wasn't deep enough to cover it all. Because there are cemetaries on the hills, it seemed possible to spot a cemetary from almost anywhere in Sarajevo that I stood.
We walked to the Jajce barracks, which weren't easy to find. They were built by the Austrians in the late 19th century and used as a hospital sometime after the First World War until April 1992. The building was shelled pretty badly and virtually no effort has been made to clean it up. It has high walls but they don't hide the collapsed roof, broken windows and walls sprayed by bullets. I climbed a wall to peer into the overgrown grounds and cut my finger while doing it. Thank God for tetanus shots!
Just as we were looking around, the mosques began to call out the faithful for prayer. The words are blurred by the echoes of the hills and partially muffled by the snow. By the time they reached us all that remained were undecipherable howls. Although it was the middle of the day, the setting made me think of Halloween.
The gates of the barracks' wall on one side were not locked so I had to do a bit of exploring. Barbed wire was piled around the sides but it was fairly simple to avoid it and go on, but I peered only through the shattered windows. There was so much unrecognizable trash inside, and I didn't feel like getting hurt any more than I already had been. Perhaps it had not been cleared of things that go Boom. Perhaps it had been. I thought of the barbed wire outside and I decided that it ought be taken as a fool's warning, so I turned back. So we went back towards the old city, to get something hot to drink.
Sometime much later we found another cafe bar along the pedestrian street someways to the East of the old city. The cafe was pretty stylish and they were playing some of the coolest music that I had heard in a while. In my pathetic South-Slavic (it's a bit of a blend of the local languages that the patient locals can sometimes understand) I tried to ask what the album was. The bartender asked me if I spoke German and then we understood each other a lot better.
Our conversation went from the very successful Yugoslavian band, Bijelo Dugme, that put out the disk years ago, to the war and on to BiH's situation in the world today. He lived in the city during the siege. I gather that he was pretty upset about the whole thing at the time, but that fermenting sentiment has become bitter resentment over the years. He thought nostalgically of Yugoslavia: it was peaceful and people got along. "Why did the Serbs have to attack us? we all believe in one God," he wanted to know, "and why didn't the rest of the world step in and help us??" I was nine at the time. I couldn't respond so I took the question as rhetorical. But should it have been? Should I relegate questions like that to the realm of Philosophy and avoid answering? I have a good excuse to not answer that question. At the time, I imagine, everyone else in the rest of the world felt the same thing.
Even though it's usually the other way around, here's what else the bartender told me: "The factories where Bosnians used to work before the war were destroyed during it, now there are no jobs for the people who used to work there; half a million people are unemployed. The Bosnian passport is useless because now visas are needed for every other country (because we have so many people leaving here and working in other countries illegally) and the travels of his youth on a Yugoslav passport (which could get him anywhere) are over for sure. Now the country is managed by foreigners (it's really two nations with rotating presidencies of BiH) because the EU decides where the money they loan BiH will go. Even if the EU commissioner is not President, said the bartender, he might as well be because he is the only one with money to spend" [translated from German and condensed].
